The blunt instrument of war

In his brilliant book,
The Telling Year: Belfast 1972, journalist Malachi
O'Doherty describes the kind of experience that is too
insignificant to make the history books but that nevertheless helps
to make history.

One night, a little drunk, he heard soldiers in his back garden
and blew a whistle. The next loud sound was the soldiers kicking in
the back door of the house. He was dragged out into the garden by a
solider who announced "I'm going to shoot you, Paddy", stood him
against the wall and pointed his rifle at him.

In fact the soldiers merely beat and kicked him, perhaps because
he managed to half-convince them that he really was a journalist.
Others in his situation probably did not get off so lightly.

In O'Doherty's little vignette, it is perfectly understandable
both that a young man like him might do something stupid and that
the soldiers should react violently. In fact, the only thing that
is a little surprising is that, in the context of 1972, the victim
in this case did not go on to become a terrorist.

This is what happens when you have an army on the streets and it
is why armies, of their very nature, tend to create more political
problems than they solve. Yet with the longest campaign ever waged
by the British army coming to an end at midnight last night, it is
not at all obvious that the lessons of this engagement have been
learned. If they had been, the British would never have gone into
Iraq.

In 1972, the British army had 28,000 soldiers in Northern
Ireland - nearly four times more than in the much vaster area of
Iraq. Operation Motorman in that year was the largest infantry
deployment since the second World War. In all, over a quarter of a
million British soldiers have served in Northern Ireland. Those
troops were operating in a part of their own country, with all the
advantages of linguistic and cultural familiarity, and yet they
never achieved their primary goal of defeating terrorism.

Last year, in the foreword to the army's own comprehensive
assessment of the campaign, the then commander Gen Sir Mike
Jackson, wrote that the campaign was "one of the very few ever
brought to a successful conclusion by the armed forces of a
developed nation against an irregular force". Yet the report itself
is rather more circumspect, concluding, realistically: "Security
forces do not 'win' insurgency campaigns militarily; at best they
can contain or suppress the level of violence and . . . reduce a
situation to an 'acceptable level of violence'."

It can certainly be argued that the British army did achieve
this kind of limited success in the 1980s and 1990s. It bolstered a
kind of limited stability in which the conflict descended into a
constant background obscenity that would flare up from time to time
into spectacular atrocity.

Even this ambivalent success, however, can be claimed only by
discounting the army's role in raising the conflict to the high
levels of the early 1970s in the first place. After its very early
role as an emergency fire brigade, the army did more to feed the
flames than to quench them.

The army's official assessment is in fact surprisingly honest
about this. It points out that the initial phase of an army's
involvement in a civil conflict creates a pattern that is hard to
change thereafter: "The term 'honeymoon period' is a misnomer. It
is not a honeymoon. It is the most important phase of the
campaign."

It acknowledges also: "It could be argued that the army did make
the situation worse by, in practice, alienating the Catholic
community in 1970 and 1971 . . . a desire to 'sort the Micks out'
was often apparent."

Both militarily and ideologically, the army was a player, not a
referee. As with the paramilitaries, most of the people it killed
were civilians: of the 301 people who died at the hands of the
British army, 121 were republican paramilitaries and 10 were
loyalist paramilitaries. Just as deadly in its own way, though, was
the extent to which the army's presence and actions actually
supported the IRA's definition of the conflict.

It arrived with a colonial mentality, viewing Northern Ireland
as another field for the operations it had run in Malaya, Kenya,
Aden and Cyprus and identifying Catholics as the suspect
population. (The army's assessment actually confirms what sounded
like an apocryphal story that banners used in both Derry and
Belfast to order rioters to disperse were written in Arabic.) This
turned a complex, largely internecine conflict into an "anti-
imperialist struggle" and it took the IRA 30 years to realise that
it was fighting the wrong war.

The great irony of Operation Banner is that the army probably
learned more from it than its political masters did. Its essential
conclusion is that there are no military solutions to political
problems and that courageous and intelligent political
interventions could have prevented much of the violence.

Soldiers may be a blunt instrument but they learn from
experience how relatively impotent they are. It is only messianic
politicians who imagine that soldiers can solve long-term
problems.